In the past, freight commerce between shippers and carriers has involved individual to individual telephone-based communications as well as telephone-based clearinghouses or third party companies employing few to many people to receive requests for shipments and to find available carriers. The shipping industry has relied on many oral communications along with handwritten forms and notes. This has led to widespread mistakes and miscommunication in the areas of load, loading, equipment, routing, delivery, billing and payment information. Such verbal and manual processes have been inefficient, time consuming, personnel intensive and expensive.
The introduction of desktop computers has made more data available to agents handling shipment requests, but the process for matching shippers' requests for shipping loads to freight carriers' critically important equipment availability and prices has yet to be truly addressed. Present products and systems that indicate fixed or variable established carrier lane rates for selection by shippers without guaranteed equipment availability are quite limited at best and can actually fail at high volumes. Many companies spend most of their communication time and efforts in the very attempt to ascertain carrier equipment availability. In this effort some use telephone and facsimile (fax) communication in conjunction with computer database information. Other systems are known generally to be in development with some recently completed, but these systems, while beginning to incorporate some of the basic portions of this invention that were an integral part of this invention at a time substantially prior to their offerings as components of the initial parts of the full concept development of this invention, differ greatly from the methods, system and capabilities of this invention in very important aspects. Companies are rushing to the marketplace with services beginning to parallel or outright copy certain aspects or portions of this invention but in their narrow view actually exacerbate the fragmentation in the industry. This will eventually create a proliferation of thousands of unrelated, non-integrated web sites causing a communications overload. Their directions lack the core requirements and approach to effect a comprehensive universal freight transportation management communication utility method for shippers and carriers along with truly electronically integrating systems, networks, and users. Even present Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and E-mail approaches just cannot address the requirements to meet the needs in the burgeoning freight transportation communication environment.
There also exist certain electronic bulletin boards for posting loads and/or equipment. These are still even more basic concepts of communication. The information posted on these bulletin boards is developed using the non-automated methods mentioned above as well as computer transmissions. As with other systems, posting services differ even more so from this invention. Such services typically just list origin and destination cities and states, the type of equipment needed, pick-up date, the shipper or carrier name along with a telephone number of same requesting an interested carrier to reply. Some services also indicate a price that would be paid along with the type of commodity being shipped. Recently some of these services have placed these types of bulletin boards on the internet to access carriers. A few of such posting services also let carriers list their names and telephone numbers to offer their equipment at certain locations for shippers to reply. These are very basic services with non-qualified, non-anonymous yet typically unknown participants.